It’s always the ones you most expect. So said a friend of mine on Saturday evening after Russell Brand outed himself as the subject of a joint Sunday Times/Dispatches investigation into allegations of rape and sexual assault against the former television presenter by a number of women.
That Essex lad, just a bit of banter persona never sat well with me. I didn’t find him funny or entertaining and his involvement in Big Brother was what actually stopped me watching the show.
The Dispatches documentary was called In Plain Sight for a very good reason. It was evident to anyone watching Brand that his antics on air – touching female guests’ breasts, sitting on their lap in his underwear and his appalling and disgusting comments about a female colleague in the newsroom at BBC Radio 2 – that this was not a persona he cultivated. This is who he was in real life too.
Read More
- First look at Russell Brand's time at Channel 4 finds no reports to bosses – CEO
- Russell Brand: how the comedy industry uses humour to abuse and silence women
- MPs ask if Elon Musk ‘personally intervened' on Russell Brand's status on X
It was then reported on Monday that the London Metropolitan Police are investigating a complaint of a sexual assault alleged to have taken place in London in 2003. Given that one of the women who took part in the documentary visited a rape crisis centre in California, where physical evidence was collected the morning after her alleged rape, it is possible that a criminal complaint could also follow in the United States.
Brand has stated in his video that all of his relationships during the period in question were consensual and that will be a matter for investigators and possibly courts to decide. But he had to know this was coming. He could not have believed, given the number of revelations about people in high-profile roles in the media and entertainment industry, that he would escape scrutiny. No amount of yogic chanting or headstands on his YouTube channel was going to prevent the inevitable.
I wanted to write a sentence here about Brand’s supporters accusing the mainstream media of undertaking a witch hunt against him and I was trying to find the masculine equivalent of witch hunt and, surprise surprise, there isn’t one. That’s because it’s the women who have come forward to tell their stories and the journalists who researched and verified those stories who are the subject of vilification by Brand’s supporters.
Brand, in attempting to set the narrative for his millions of social media followers, questioned whether another agenda was at play; one which was designed to silence him and his conspiracy theories regarding the mainstream media and big pharma.
These women did not just come forward now. They told media bosses at the time, they sat in rooms where it was discussed whether or not all female staff should be removed from a programme to reduce the risk of Brand acting inappropriately. They were victim-shamed then. Now, none of the networks where he worked will confirm whether or not complaints were received or investigated.
When a man in his thirties is sending a car to collect a 16-year-old girl from school and bring her to his house and you’re arguing that she is of the age of consent and she knew what she was doing, then you are the red flag. You’re the sort of person who referred to the then 16-year-old Mandy Smith as a “wild child” when her two-and-a-half-year relationship with Bill Wyman, 33 years her senior, became public knowledge.
Grooming and sexual abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is enabled and given free rein by others who don’t speak up. Women who had no power or agency at the time have taken more than a decade to find their voices and those seeking to silence or dismiss them are the sort of people who’d write a character reference for someone convicted of sexual assault. Until women feel they are supported in coming forward we will continue to have these types of historical revelations emerging regarding people in the public eye.
The “me too” movement isn’t, as some would claim, an over-correction for centuries of bad behaviour by men whereby some men are now being held accountable for behaviour that, in the context of the times, was customary. There were things that everybody knew about but no-one spoke of. Rather, it is a societal reset borne of women tired of accepting the things they cannot change and choosing to change the things they cannot accept.
